hopelessnightowl_sandboxfandomcom-20200214-history
Letter to the SCP staff
Dear Zyn: I am one of the former SCP members who has decided to leave the wiki and join the RPC Authority Wiki over the past 24 hours. After lurking in O5 Command and observing statements by admins and social media mods, it is clear that you guys are looking for answers to what has lead to the firestorm of backlash this week. As a social conservative who is part of this backlash, I feel I may as well try to offer some insight. I am writing this to you because to my memory you were one of the only admins who did not actively engage in the type of bullying, cowardice, and harassment of those with dissident political views that have driven me and others away from your community. I wish I could say it was a matter of a few bad apples, but unfortunately the problem is in fact with the overwhelming majority of administrators along with at least a sizeable percentage of lower staff. I am aware that there is currently a lot of "brigading" going on thanks to Mister Metokur's video, and no doubt many of those participating are trolls and people who did not know or care about the SCP community before but simply will jump on any anti-SJW bandwagon. But don't kid yourselves, the admins were creating a toxic community environment long before the raindbow SCP seal thing. You guys brought this on yourselves, hate to say it. Let me explain where I'm coming from: I joined SCP in January of last year, was active for three or four months, posted several drafts in the Drafts forum, and then was inactive but lurked in both SCP wiki and O5 Command for the following year. I've heard some defenders of the current staff say people are taking things out of proportion and reacting to a few negative instances and misunderstandings. My own experience in the community wold beg to differ. It didn't take me long after joining to figure out that I had better keep my political views to myself or risk being banned. But the thing is, I had already intended to do that. I never go out of my way to express my politics in creepypasta writing communities. But the more I observed, the more it became clear that the staff could not stop themselves from bringing queer politics up, and then getting angry and banning people whenever dissent was voiced. While lurking in O5 discipline threads for IRC in particular, I saw multiple instances in which staff went out of their way to bait people into disagreeing with them only to ban them for it. It went something like this: The admin on duty in Site 19 was really itching to shove their politics down someone's throat today, so they either asked a loaded but open-ended question to start a conversation with someone over LGBT issues, or butted into a conversation that was already going on. The admin at first pretended to be interested in hearing out the other person,and started stringing them along with questions like "Interesting. Can you please elaborate on that opinion?" A few moments later, the other person said something that the admin considered over-the-line even though it was exactly what they should have expected if they were interested in a genuine debate. They then say something along the lines of "well, I was willing to be reasonable and hear you out, but you went too far with your bigotry when you brought in the 'kids need a mom and a dad' argument. Banned for a day. You are free to be a hateful bigot at home but once you bring your vitriol onto chat it's a ban". In other words, staff would intentionally give users the false impression that they were allowed to disagree with their views in chat, with the premeditated intention of banning them when they voiced disagreement. And what really got me was the fact that in O5,none of the staff had enough self-awareness to think that this behavior could be a problem. There was never any feedback in the staff forums to indicate that any of you thought this was anything but completely normal and acceptable. This was especially the case when the pronoun bot was installed in Site 19 and users were harassed by staff for so much as criticizing the decision to get a pronoun bot. How you guys did not anticipate that not everyone would be onboard with it is astonishing to me. You added a chat feature that basically allowed people to engage in spam LGBT roleplay with their pronoun nonsense, and were somehow confused that not everyone appreciated it. While this behavior seemed somewhat contained to chat at first, it became clear to me that it would spread to the wiki. Many if not most of the most prominent staff are straight bullies and cowards when it comes to dealing with anyone not completely in agreement with their views, especially DeadlyMoose and LilyFlower. And this includes harassment of individuals who are queer but simply don't like the way staff are coopting their identity. And you know what? I was still willing to give you guys the benefit of the doubt. I saw what was happening in chat, but I simply resolved not to use Site 19. I saw the Pride Month SCP logo and thought "well, that's cancerous as fuck, but I just won't visit SCP for a month." And I had intended from the beginning to treat staff with human respect no matter what their politics or sexual identity. But recent commentary by wiki and social media staff have made it clear that I am no longer welcome on SCP, if I ever was to begin with. If doesn't matter that I never intended to bring politics into SCP and never bullied or harassed someone for being queer, I am a social conservative, and you guys want me gone. So I'm gone. I would have left earlier if there had been an alternative earlier. To reiterate, staff brought this on themselves. There was never a phenomenon of people telling gay and trans users to kill themselves or whatever. It wasn't even a matter of conservatives bringing up their views, since we learned to put up or shut up long ago. No, virtually all of the time it was vindictive staff going out of their way to draw dissent, basically daring anyone bold enough to disagree with them, and then harassing or banning them. Of course, now, over the past 24 hours or so, you may have gotten some people coming in, harassing LGBT users, and telling them to kill themselves. This is not something I support, but it is once again your fault. The behavior of staff has not only driven dissidents way, but it also created an environment that was just begging to get noticed by an army of 4chan trolls. It's hard for me to feel sympathy for you guys now. It is especially hard for me to feel sympathy given that staff are continuing to show a spectacular lack of self-awareness in response to the current situation. You guys admit that you may have done something wrong, but you are still clinging to the notion that it was just a few bad incidents blown out of proportion, lack of effective communication on your part, or some other sorry-not-sorry excuse. An example of this cluelessness is the way staff keep bringing up that they supported Pride Month openly because over half of you are LGBT. This betrays a lack of self-awareness in at least two ways. First, it demonstrates obliviousness that you guys are not the community and are not the most important group of people on SCP, and that you have no servant ethic when it comes to your staff roles. And second, it confirms what many of us have known all along: that queer and trans staff have been chain-recruiting their own into staff positions in order to solidify power. Most people do not consider having 50% LGBT staff on a non-political site to be normal. I don't hate you guys, I really, really don't. I wish you well despite the fact that my politics make me anathema to at least a sizeable portion of you. But I have to move on because recent comments by staff, combined with the maintained official position that "supporting Pride Month is not up for negotiation or debate", combined with anecdotal rumors I've heard that some of you have started doing things like changing the pronouns in popular SCPs in order to retcon SCP to be more SJW-friendly in-universe as if a sophisticated global scientific organization like the Foundationn would be having any of that made-up pronoun shit, combined with multiple hypocrisies such as the fact that the doorknob joke scip was deemed problematic by staff and yet SCP-231 is still on the wiki, all of these things make it clear that you guys are not about to learn your lesson any time soon. Feel free to share this on O5 command if you want to.